I'm skeptical that they'd be able to improve the Reed and Sue casting enough

They could cast my mother as Sue and I think that would be better enough to counterbalance the losses of Evans and Chiklis.

I mean, they were good, but she was much worse.

That's contradicted by the announcement of its release date in July 2014.

Really? Awesome! I had somehow missed that announcement. X-Men: First Class was my favorite in a year filled with excellent Marvel movies last year, so that's good news for me.

Really, I wish they had just set The Avengers not in New York, which I think of as Spider-Man's zone, but it's totally possible our current Peter Parker simply wasn't super yet during this particular alien invasion. After all, that movie comes out later this summer! And possibly The Lizard simply isn't a big enough deal for The Avengers to come together, since the implication of this movie was that they only come together for really big world-saving type events. The Avengers universe clearly doesn't acknowledge the existence of mutants, so I'm okay with pretending that's a whole separate continuity - I never really found the whole mutant political mess, which is so important to the X-Men stories, to make much of an impact on the other Marvel comics anyway. Though possibly I simply didn't read the right comics.

But Stark Tower is in New York. Isn't the Avengers Mansion there too?

And the Baxter Building is in NY too.

Why does Spider-Man get dibs?

There's a cute interview quote with a couple of the Avengers saying how their sequels will be awkward, because why not just call [X] if there's a big fight to be fought?

Did Stark Tower exist in the first Iron Man movies? I thought they were set in California.

Huh. A quick Wikipedia visit tells me that was all Favreau's idea, and Iron Man is usually New York in comics.

I will admit that I know absolutely nothing about comic book canon for the Avengers and Iron Man, and only a little about Spider-Man, so in my head that's his territory. Clearly, my head is wrong. But just in movie-land, The Avengers never cam near New York until this movie.

Given the modern approach to celebrity, mutants would be equally as celebrated as they are hated, to my mind. Lots of disaffected people who want to be mutants or just want to get close to them.

But just in movie-land, The Avengers never cam near New York until this movie.

Well, the Avengers didn't exist before this movie so they weren't really anywhere. But, before the movie, Stark had built his tower, since it opens with him flipping the power onto self-sustaining.

Given the modern approach to celebrity, mutants would be equally as celebrated as they are hated, to my mind

The mutant metaphor is primarily a race/sexuality metaphor. Sure, some people listen to black music just to be cool or are LUG, but it's really a drop in the bucket when compared to everyone else.

The individual avengers existed before this movie, and we had never seen any of them in New York. And Stark Tower was built before it, yes, but we had neither seen nor heard of it, so I think I can be forgiven for associating Stark with the west coast. Therefore, to be, the uneducated audience member, it seems like Stark got moved to NYC just for this movie. I basically think Favreau was very smart to set the Iron Man movies on the West Coast, precisely because New York seems remarkably crowded comic book wise, and I wish that had continued into The Avengers, despite not being comic book Canon.

New Hobbit production video blog.

I don't see the NYC setting being a problem, honestly. Are any of the individual Avengers established as living there full time? (I assume Stark Tower NY isn't Tony Stark's primary residence...)